Regardless of my political leaning, I’ve always felt the greatest failure of George W. Bush’s administration was its unwillingness to be accountable.

We have seen time and time again, when someone makes a mistake, and then in response stands up and takes responsibility for that mistake, the American people, in general, will forgive and eventually forget.

On a completely different scale we’ve seen two examples of accountable behavior in the sports world during the past week.

First, there was Los Angeles Dodgers hitting machine Manny Ramirez — perhaps the best hitter in baseball over the past decade — testing positive for a drug used for either a female fertility drug called HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin).

Of course, this is a big deal because HCG has no use to a male pro athlete with two exceptions: he’s trying to get pregnant, or, he’s a steroid user trying to get his body’s testosterone production moving after cycling off steroids.

So Manny got caught, and what did he do? He said he made a mistake and that he was sorry. A novel concept in some circles today.

“Unfortunately, the medication was banned under our drug policy,” said a statement from Ramirez, more than likely written by agent Scott Boras and the Dodgers. “Under the policy that mistake is now my responsibility….I want to apologize to Mr. McCourt, Mrs. McCourt, Mr. Torre, my teammates, the Dodger organization, and to the Dodger fans. L.A. is a special place to me and I know everybody is disappointed. So am I. I’m sorry about this whole situation.”

And even though many sports geeks outside of blind Dodgers fans assume Manny’s a steroid user, the situation has pretty much gone away.

Then came a situation featuring Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, one of the more vocal owners in all of sports, as well as one of the most digitally savvy for obvious reasons.

The ugly ordeal started last Saturday night after Game 3 between the Denver Nuggets and the Mavericks in Dallas, when the Nuggets benefited from an NBA-acknowledged officiating mistake and beat the Mavericks 106-105.

Cuban was understandably upset the referees had cost his team a valuable game, and got into a shouting match with Lydia Moore, the mother of Nuggets player Kenyon Martin.

According to Cuban, a fan called the Nuggets “thugs,” and he looked at Moore and said, “That includes your son.” Martin’s agent told The Denver Post that Cuban said, “Your son is a punk.”  But at that point, it didn’t matter. The damage was done and Martin was upset.

On Monday, Martin said he’d take care of things himself. “It’s a little personal, and I’m going to take care of it,” he said. “I’m not going to do the whole media thing, back and forth. That’s his thing. I’m more of a face-to-face type of dude.”

So how did Cuban react? Well, on the Dallas Mavericks blog today he wrote a post apologizing for his behavior.

“It doesnt matter why I said it,” he wrote while most probably wearing one of his trademarked not-so-good-looking t-shirts. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Now, the reality is that this has gotten out of hand…So at this point I would like to apologize to you and your mom KMart for my comment. I should have not said anything and I was wrong. Hopefully you will accept the apology and we can move on.”

Boom! Welcome to accountability my friends. Better yet, at least for Cuban, the story will be done by the Midnight ESPN SportsCenter.

What’s most interesting to me about accountability is this: if you think of today’s media consumer — from soccer mom to sports fan to corporate suit — they are looking for authentic voices.

That’s why they bypass the corporate Website and instead look for random virtual voices on blogs and social Websites which might provide an objective take about a company, a restaurant, an athlete, an issue, whatever. It’s why Amazon.com realized that it sells product more briskly when there are at least 12 customer reviews.

It becomes authentic, real, objective.  And when you think about it, there is arguably no more seemingly authentic behavior today than being accountable.